Hedda Sterne is famous for being the only woman in Life magazine's group portrait of abstract expressionists. Among photographs of American artists, it was second in fame only to Hans Namuth's shots, also for Life, of Jackson Pollock at work. Pollock was in Nina Leen's group photo of 1951, of course, along with Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, William Baziotes, Adolf Gottlieb, Willem de Kooning and half a dozen others, plus Sterne, who has died aged 100, having survived all her better-known companions.

It was a grouping of the best and brightest in American art in the early 1950s, 14 men with one woman. But when Sterne walked out of that improvised photographic studio, the only thing she took with her was her shadow on the wall. "In terms of career," she told an interviewer in later life, "it's probably the worst thing that happened to me."

Nina Leen/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

A New York Herald Tribune critic dubbed the group the irascible 18, shortened to the irascibles (three of them missed the photo session), because they had written an open letter protesting against the perceived conservatism of the Metropolitan museum. Neither the name nor the issue stuck around for long. Sterne said it was a lie anyway so far as she was concerned. She was neither an abstract expressionist nor an irascible.

But she was a woman, and as the Mary Astor character complains in the John Huston movie of The Maltese Falcon: "I got a raw deal." Lee Krasner had to struggle to make a name as a painter without being tied to her husband, Pollock, and so did Elaine de Kooning. Sterne simply refused to play the game. She was a brilliant painter, an abstractionist on and off but not wholly committed to it – which was oblivion in critical and fashion terms in the 1950s – and never an abstract expressionist.

Art at the top in 1950s New York was as likely as not a one-shot career. A painter found an idiom that resounded with critics and public and stuck with it, but Sterne, as she put it, never had a logo style. Betty Parsons, her dealer for many years, reiterated this. She said that Sterne was always searching. "She had many ways. Most artists just have one way to go."

The group photograph had comical consequences, though Sterne did not get many laughs from it. She had arrived late for the session and Leen pushed her to the back of the group, where she stood on a table. Her apparently black coat in the monochrome photograph stands out against the arrayed grey suits and ties, and her position made her the apex of the group, strikingly beautiful above the frowns of the men. "You paint just like a man," the male artists used to josh her ("that was supposed to make me die with being pleased"), but after the photo, she said, they hated her.

Sterne was born Hedwig Lindenberg into a well-off family in Bucharest. Her father was a teacher, her brother Edouard became a conductor and professor at the Paris Conservatoire. She told Sarah Boxer for an article in the New York Review of Books last December: "I knew I wanted to be an artist at age five or six ... Artists were always referred to as great artists. I thought that's what the profession was. One word: greatartist."

Hedda trod the well-worn path to study in the Paris studios of André Lhote and Fernand Léger. In 1939 she was making collages by tearing up paper and noting how the pieces fell to the floor, "the way you look at clouds". She exhibited them at that year's Paris Salon, where the masterly abstractionist Hans Arp saw them and persuaded her to let him put them on exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Paris gallery and later in her short-lived London gallery.

In Bucharest Hedda had married Fritz Stern, a businessman. When the Nazis invaded Romania in 1940, he changed his name to Frederick Stafford and she added an 'e' to Stern. He was in New York and helped her to join him there, although by then they had separated. Guggenheim made her welcome, gave her exhibitions in her gallery Art of This Century and introduced her to the abstract expressionists.

Sterne was elated by the buzz of New York and many of her best paintings were of the city, not as it actually looked, but as she felt it. New York, NY, No X of 1948 is simply a scaffolding of lines, an openwork cubist construct of walkways and gables laid against sky blue to induce a sense of dreamlike vertigo. Moving on to 1954 and the low-keyed eighth painting in the series (now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York) – greys, blues, muffled yellows on a surface just over six feet high by three and a half feet wide, a motor metropolis of tightly curving ramps with headlight beams spreading like stains suggest a vision, slightly smudged, as if seen through the thick glass window of a skyscraper; at any rate remote from the scene of automotive nightmare. Curiously, the intertwined mesh of shapes suggests the dripped paint trails of a Pollock abstract.

In 1944, through Parsons, Sterne found another Romanian to marry – Saul Steinberg, later the witty New Yorker cartoonist then serving in the US navy. His serial adultery doomed the marriage but, although they separated in 1960, they remained close friends until his death in 1999, allies in the new world from a cultivated corner of the old world lost behind the iron curtain.

Throughout her career, she drew beautiful pencil portraits of her friends, including her second husband, to add to an early self-portrait in which, like Ovid's Daphne, she metamorphoses into a tree. These drawings formed her final exhibition at her last dealer, the CDS gallery, New York, in 2008. Alongside this, she painted colour abstracts while denying that they were abstract. The point was made when, afflicted by cataracts and almost blind in 1998, she started to make white on white drawings, saying that they depicted the floaters she saw behind her eyes.

Sterne did not give up working until 2004, when she suffered a severe stroke, though behind her blind eyes she continued to think drawing and, alone in the world, worked on forgetting her ego. "To a great extent I have lost all interest in this fiction, Hedda Sterne," she told Boxer.